Arts news

• Solving One Problem With Publishing Genres

  02-06-2021 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Though “Asian fantasy” has been exploding in popularity as a sub-genre of science fiction and fantasy, not all authors think that’s a good categorization. R.F. Kuang, of the tremendous The Poppy War trilogy, says the name “doesn’t really make a lot of sense, either as a literary category or as an identity category. Obviously, there are a lot of different things that fall under the subcategory of Asian, including East Asian, including South Asians, Southeast Asian,
  
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• The Independence Of UK Museums May Be In Danger

  02-06-2021 23:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  The government appears to be meddling in free speech on university campuses – and now in national museum decisions. “This came to a head recently when it refused to reappoint Aminul Hoque, a distinguished academic at Goldsmiths, who had been on the board of the Royal Museums Greenwich since 2016. Because his work focused on issues of decolonisation, the government decided they didn’t want him as a trustee. His term of office was not renewed, and the chair of trustees resigned
  
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• Disney Is Rebranding Villains And Trying To Pretend That’s Feminist

  02-06-2021 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  It seems good at first, right? Adding dimension to villains! “In theory, this is a positive shift, Disney’s attempt to offer its young audience lessons that aren’t so dependent on innate goodness, or telegraphing that goodness with physical attributes. But as this novelty has jelled into a house style, the unofficial ban on old-fashioned evil starts to feel a little like an unholy cross between bothsidesism and aggressive branding. After all, why should any Disney charact
  
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• Gallery Assistants Aren’t Earning A Living Wage

  02-06-2021 22:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Perhaps not a shocker, but in a 300-gallery survey, results painted “a portrait of an industry beset with income inequality.” Assistants’ top pay was about $35,000 a year, or $17 an hour – not a living wage in New York State. And that also means no overtime, no health benefits, no maternity leave, nothing that one might think galleries would offer during and after the pandemic. – Artnet
  
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• Violetta Elvin, Royal Ballet Prima Ballerina, 97

  02-06-2021 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Elvin, a Russian dancer who also performed with the Bolshoi, “gave London audiences one of the first tastes of Russian style. … Elvin created roles in Frederick Ashton’s Cinderella (Summer Fairy, 1948), Daphnis and Chloe (Lykanion, 1951), Homage to the Queen (1953), and Birthday Offering (1956), as well as Roland Petit’s Ballabile (1950).” – Gramilano
  
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• How Wrens Coordinate Their Intricately Interlocking Songs

  02-06-2021 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  “A team of researchers studying brain activity of singing male and female plain-tailed wrens has discovered that the species synchronizes their frenetically paced duets, surprisingly, by inhibiting the song-making regions of their partner’s brain as they exchange phrases.” – Phys.org
  
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• Ai Weiwei accuses curators of rejecting artwork over Julian Assange content

  02-06-2021 20:37
  
  Artist claims piece was rejected from exhibition for addressing imprisonment of the WikiLeaks founderAi Weiwei has accused the organisers of a large UK art exhibition of rejecting his artwork for the show because the piece addressed the imprisonment of the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.The Chinese dissident artist and activist said the piece for The Great Big Art Exhibition featured an image of the treadmill which Assange used while seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. Continue reading..
  
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• Preserving The Jail Where Oscar Wilde Was Imprisoned

  02-06-2021 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  The prison was closed to the public in 2013 on “health and safety grounds,” but actors including Kate Winslet, local politicians, and more want to preserve the area, and turn the prison into a museum. Will Reading let them? – The New York Times
  
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• Running The Rodgers And Hammerstein Organization For 40 Years (What A Job!)

  02-06-2021 20:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  “As new ways of making money from The Sound of Music and the rest presented themselves, the job of advising the heirs and maintaining their income became much bigger. It was no longer simply a matter of giving (or withholding) approval for major new productions but also a strategic puzzle: How do you uphold an artistic legacy while exploiting technology, adjusting to a changing theatrical environment and serving progressively larger corporations?” Ted Chapin, who did just that for f
  
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• In England, An Attempt To Redefine Culture

  02-06-2021 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  For Leeds 2023, the festival’s creative director says they’ll try to “let culture loose” to reach everyone in the city during their year. Lyn Gardner agrees it’s time for a change: “Food and sport and ballroom dancing are as much part of culture as the latest Tom Stoppard play. … Both have a value, bring people together and provide the glue communities need to thrive. But also funding has often favoured one over the other and has often favoured organis
  
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• ‘Uncancel Culture’: Kevin Spacey, Aziz Ansari, Mel Gibson, Louis CK …

  02-06-2021 19:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Peter Bradshaw, considering the news that Kevin Spacey is acting again (albeit in a small European film): “Could this be Hollywood’s hot new thing – uncancel culture? The phenomenon whereby famous men once rendered unemployable in show business due to a #MeToo campaign, but with no actual criminal conviction, sidle back into the limelight, testing the reaction, playing grandmother’s footsteps with social-media outrage?” – The Guardian
  
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• What Brain-Computer Interfaces Will Do To Our Ideas Of Free Will

  02-06-2021 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  You can already see a divide in the literature – positive stories about people with ALS or locked-in syndrome learning to use neural transmitters to control movement; negative stories about the threat of law enforcement “reading” our intentions before we do. It’s the same tech, so what’s the real story? – Three Quarks Daily
  
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• Clint Eastwood Is 91, And He’s Directed 17 Films Just Since He Turned 70

  02-06-2021 18:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  And those 17 movies — which include no less than Mystic River (with Sean Penn and Tim Robbins), Million Dollar Baby (Hilary Swank), and American Sniper (Bradley Cooper) — have earned a billion dollars or so all together, not to mention a few Oscars and plenty more nominations. Maybe not every one of the 39 films he’s made over 50 years is a masterpiece, but some certainly are (Unforgiven), and the overall quality has been impressively high. What’s more, they aren’t
  
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• How ‘In The Heights’ Became The Post-Pandemic Movie Of The Summer

  02-06-2021 17:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  Lin-Manuel Miranda, whose Hamilton, filmed, made Disney+ a lot of money last year (and ensured musical theatre fans had something to watch over and over and over again while actual theatres were shuttered), says that he really wanted In the Heights to come out as scheduled. “I felt like I was back in my 20s — ‘No, please, let’s put on the show!’ Next summer felt like forever away, and I was, like, ‘But it’s good! And the world needs it!’ But I&rsq
  
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• How Atlas Obscura Is Decolonizing — No, Enhancing — Its Content

  02-06-2021 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The Internet’s favorite catalog of weird places” (as the headline fittingly describes it) is going through what it’s calling (for lack of a term that’s both better and more timely) a “decolonization project” — reviewing its thousands of listings and hundreds of articles to include the roles and viewpoints of Black, indigenous, and and other Americans traditionally overlooked. But, says editorial director Samir S. Patel, “decolonizing”
  
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• Mexico Forcibly Halts Illegal Construction Next To Teotihuacán

  02-06-2021 16:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  “[Authorities] sent in 250 National Guard troops and 60 police officers Monday to seize land next to the pre-Hispanic ruins of Teotihuacán where authorities have said bulldozers were destroying outlying parts of the archaeological site. … Officials reported last week that they had been trying since March to halt the private construction project, but work continued on what local media says were plans to build some sort of amusement park.” – AP
  
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• Long Discreetly Camouflaged, Lesbians In Ballet Are Starting to Find Themselves And Each Other

  02-06-2021 16:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  Gay men aren’t as ubiquitous in that world as some civilians think, but they’re not rare. Yet gender norms in classical ballet are even more rigid for females than for males, and queer women in the profession have tended to feel very isolated indeed. That, however, is something that the hiatus and the move online caused by the pandemic have started to change. – The New York Times
  
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• Iggy Pop ascends to greatness: Tom Copi’s best photograph

  02-06-2021 15:56
  
  ‘Iggy dived off the stage into the crowd, where he was lifted up by fans and stood above them in triumph. Someone handed him a jar of peanut butter and he smeared it on his chest’Iggy Pop and I went to the same high school in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I graduated a year ahead of him. I was not particularly into the local rock scene but I did photograph activities on and around the university campus, including a band called the Prime Movers, in which Jim Osterberg played drums. Later
  
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• Why Sarah Lane Quietly Slipped Away From ABT

  02-06-2021 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  “[After 18 years,] Lane and ABT parted ways last summer, although no announcement was made; rather, in September, her name was quietly taken off the roster. … She recently opened up to Pointe about her departure from the company, although for privacy reasons certain details are remaining undisclosed.” (Hmm.) – Pointe Magazine
  
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• As Travel Resumes, Can Italy Make Tourism Any Less Destructive?

  02-06-2021 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “While the return of tourists is essential, local politicians and leaders in the cultural sector are emphasising the need to rethink how visitors interact with heritage. But how far, during the enforced hiatus in tourism, have they actually rethought their strategies to manage visitors and their experience more effectively?” Venice and Florence have some ideas. – Apollo
  
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• Allegations Of Sexual Misconduct, And Even Assault, Rock English Drama Schools

  02-06-2021 14:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Former pupils have raised allegations including how tutors have ‘grabbed’ female students’ breasts, made sexual comments about their bodies and pressurised them to remove clothes during rehearsals or performances. … [At one of the schools,] a female student complained that a visiting teacher had sexually assaulted her at home.” – The Telegraph (UK)
  
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• Louvre Will Get New Department Of Byzantine And Coptic Art, Says New Director

  02-06-2021 14:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  “If that department comes to fruition, it would signify a break with the Louvre’s [outgoing] president, Jean-Luc Martinez, who had deemed its formation unnecessary, and a willingness to expand the ways the museum presents religious art.” – ARTnews
  
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• Afrofuturism and the sex life of coral – inside the wild mind of Ellen Gallagher

  02-06-2021 10:16
  
  The artist’s latest work is the product of ‘hard physical labour’. She reveals her inspirations – from marine ecosystems and Flemish commodity painters to Black AtlantisTalking to Ellen Gallagher about her paintings is a multi-dimensional slalom ride: we swerve from the social lives of pictures to the sex life of coral and the transportation of slaves across oceans and centuries. Right now her latest works are all finished and singing to each other across a gallery floor
  
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• The heart of Harlem: Dawoud Bey’s innovative street photography – in pictures

  02-06-2021 08:00
  
  A career retrospective at the Whitney shows how Bey’s work gave black subjects in New York a space to assert themselves and their presence in the world Continue reading...
  
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• The 106-Year-Old Dancer Who Hates The Word Old

  02-06-2021 00:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Eileen Kramer still dances every day. And she also “writes a story a day from her Sydney aged-care facility, publishes books and has entered Australia’s most prestigious painting competition. After decades living abroad, Ms Kramer returned to her home city of Sydney aged 99. Since then, she’s collaborated with artists to create several videos that showcase her primary talent and lifelong passion: dancing.” – BBC
  
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