Arts news

• How Binary Thinking Constricts Design

  11-06-2021 23:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  The ways that each culture defines gender norms and structures are unique. Historically, the U.S. enforced a rigid gender binary to support its relentless growth, eliminating any traces of those that threatened its perception of normalcy. Prior to colonization, many Indigenous cultures valued queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people as integral members of society. – Inside Design
  
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• Why Has Philosophy Failed?

  11-06-2021 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  For almost any abstract notion, some philosopher has wondered what it really is. Yet, despite this wealth of questions and the centuries spent tackling them, philosophers haven’t successfully provided any answers. They’ve tried long and hard but nothing they’ve said towards answering those questions has quite made the grade. – Aeon
  
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• Behind The Debate On Critical Race Theory

  11-06-2021 22:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The debate isn’t about whether there’s been racism; it’s about what racism has meant and what it’s done to America. Is it something that’s been progressively overcome as we move toward fulfilling our national ideals, or is it something that’s been a constant force in society, making society itself irredeemably racist?” – Christian Science Monitor
  
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• Carlos Acosta Calls For Ballet That Reflects Now

  11-06-2021 22:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “I don’t want to keep riding with [my] own Swan Lake or The Nutcracker – that’s fine, I love them, that made my career – but what else can I bring that speaks about me now? That’s why every time I do programming, I encourage choreographers and collaborators to go towards that direction.” – The Stage
  
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• As LA’s Center Theatre Group Director Retires, The Enterprise Needs A Rethink

  11-06-2021 21:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The character of Michael Ritchie’s audience has not been shaped in this devout manner. The marketing of hits has replaced more time-consuming forms of outreach. On the level of scale, this may make sense. But theater isn’t a traditional business. And while loyalty may not register on year-end financial statements, it pays long-term dividends.” – Los Angeles Times
  
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• So Women Can’t Act In ‘Godot’, Eh? Take *This*, Beckett Estate!

  11-06-2021 21:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  In Godot Is a Woman by the theatre company Silent Faces, “three glum, bowler-hatted clowns … are waiting for the Beckett estate to answer their call about performance rights for Godot. They wait … and they wait, until a message that they have moved up to eighth in the queue sends them into a [dance routine]. … They become theatre historians, listing all the productions that have been banned, then judge and jury in a travesty trial of the Beckett estate.” –
  
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• Tania Leon Wins 2021 Pulitzer for Music

  11-06-2021 20:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Pulitzer citation describes Stride as “a musical journey full of surprise, with powerful brass and rhythmic motifs that incorporate Black music traditions from the US and the Caribbean into a Western orchestral fabric.” – NewMusicBox
  
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• Is The Nation-State Still The Best Way To Organize The Globe?

  11-06-2021 20:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  The nation-state is not so old as we are often told, nor has it come to be quite so naturally. Getting this history right means telling a different story about where our international political order has come from—which in turn points the way to an alternative future. – Boston Review
  
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• Gottfried Böhm, The German Expressionist Of Brutalist Architects, Dead At 101

  11-06-2021 20:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  He was one of postwar German’s most prominent architects, and had been the country’s only living Pritzker Prize winner. “His most revered works resemble jagged concrete mountains, among them the town hall in Bensberg in western Germany that he shaped as a grand fortress and crown of the city. So too the massive pilgrimage church in Neviges, near Düsseldorf, seems to have been hewn out of the rock and built to last for eternity. What looks so heavy from the outside yet app
  
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• How English Departments Waned

  11-06-2021 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  The old critics used familiar terms of analysis—irony, structure, symbol . . . The new theorists traded in logocentrism, “the Other,” undecidability, “infinite paradigm of difference.” Their vocabulary reduced the audience for academic criticism. American undergraduates couldn’t understand it, but so what? – First Things
  
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• Narendra Modi Launches A Culture War Against Bollywood

  11-06-2021 19:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  “[The Indian Prime Minister’s Hindu nationalist government] is using powerful tools to curtail the creative freedom of Bollywood — in particular the influence of Muslims, who have an outsize presence in the industry. The measures pushed by the Modi government include indiscriminate tax investigations, trumped-up accusations against actors and directors, intimidation and harassment in response to certain movies and TV shows, and the chilling rap of law enforcement at the door.&
  
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• Goodreads Bug Erases Book Ratings

  11-06-2021 18:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  It’s unknown how many books are affected by the bug. The number of ratings per book lost seem, without any further information, to be random. Authors took to Twitter with their worries, because for authors, the loss of reviews and ratings is in no way a simple error or a minor issue, as the platform is a powerful tool for book discoverability and promotion. – Publishers Weekly
  
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• Planned Film About Jacinda Ardern And Christchurch Mosque Massacre Draws Huge Backlash In New Zealand

  11-06-2021 18:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  The just-announced project They Are Us, to be written and directed by New Zealander Andrew Niccol (writer and co-producer of The Truman Show, writer-director of, among others, Gattaca and Good Kill) and starring Rose Byrne, focuses on the aftermath of the 2019 mass shooting and the national campaign led by Prime Minister Ardern to ban assault rifles in the country. Within a day of the news arriving, many Kiwis reacted with fury to the focus on white politicians rather than the Muslim victims an
  
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• Varying measures of success for letter writers | Letters

  11-06-2021 17:49
  
  Readers respond to suggestions that prolific letter contributors should be commemorated with statuesThere are other metrics for measuring letter writing success. I may not have had as many letters published as the Big Four (Letters, 8 June), but I bet none of them have had a letter published in the Review and illustrated by cartoonist Tom Gauld. No statue required.Maggie JohnstonSt Albans, Hertfordshire• Jeanette Hamilton asks: “Do women make no epistolary contributions to the Guardia
  
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• Glasgow International: screens lure eyeballs but it’s the sculptures that thrill – review

  11-06-2021 17:42
  
  A feverish appraisal of our fast-food culture takes in grotesque sitcoms, erotic body-horror – and a bubblegum-chewing witch getting spankedNew York, 1986: artists Gretchen Bender and Cindy Sherman record a conversation. Bender had just edited the video for Megadeth’s Peace Sells and Sherman asks about videos she’s making with manipulated television footage – does she want to change TV itself? “I think of the media as a cannibalistic river,” Bender replies, de
  
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• Do You Know About Virtual YouTube?

  11-06-2021 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  A virtual YouTube is a channel that follows an animated or virtual character instead of a real-life person. These virtual YouTubers (VTubers for short) first became popular in Japan in the mid-2010s, and now have spread around the world. – Slate
  
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• As Marin Alsop Leaves The Baltimore Symphony, Why Aren’t There More Maestras At Top US Orchestras?

  11-06-2021 17:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  “When she took the position in 2007, she was the first female music director of a top-tier American orchestra. She was, it seemed certain then, the avatar of a new generation of women on important podiums. … But when she departs this summer, the field will go back to the way it was before she came: 25 major orchestras … with no female music directors. Alsop and her Baltimore appointment are often referred to as trailblazing, but so far she remains alone on this particular tr
  
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• Italian TV employees suspected of thieving dozens of works of art

  11-06-2021 16:49
  
  ‘Priceless’ pieces removed from Rai’s offices by employees and replaced with fakes, police believe“Disloyal employees” at Italy’s public broadcaster, Rai, are suspects in the theft of dozens of works of art from its offices thought to date back to the 1970s.In what the daily newspaper Il Messaggero has described as “the sack of Rai”, the “priceless” artworks were removed from the broadcaster’s headquarters in Rome and units across
  
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• Italian TV employees blamed for theft of dozens of works of art

  11-06-2021 16:49
  
  ‘Priceless’ pieces removed from Rai’s offices by employees and replaced with fakes, police believe“Disloyal employees” at Italy’s public broadcaster, Rai, have been blamed for the theft of dozens of works of art from its offices thought to date back to the 1970s.In what the daily newspaper Il Messaggero has described as “the sack of Rai”, the “priceless” artworks were removed from the broadcaster’s headquarters in Rome and units a
  
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• Conductor Grant Llewellyn, Late Of North Carolina Symphony, Makes His Way Back From A Stroke

  11-06-2021 16:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Last summer, back home in Wales after completing his 16-year term in Raleigh, he suffered what turned out to be a three-day stroke that severely impaired the use of his right arm and leg. After a month’s hospitalization and six months of physical therapy, though he can’t hold a baton, he is back working with the Orchestre national de Bretagne, his ensemble in Rennes, France. “The irony of my situation is that I can conduct Beethoven symphonies but I can’t get out of bed.
  
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• ‘The thirst trap of London’: UK welcomes Every Woman Biennial

  11-06-2021 16:16
  
  This summer the world’s largest showcase of female and non-binary art comes to Britain. Its curator describes her mission to reclaim the art world from tech brosIn 2019, the most recent iteration of the Every Woman Biennial drew 3,000 attendees to two galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Among the 600 artists represented were a 12-year-old trans photographer of moths and butterflies and a 91-year-old multimedia artist who makes paper assemblages.“That was ultimately the show of my
  
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• By The Numbers: Who Are The Bosses At US Ballet Companies And What Are They Paid?

  11-06-2021 16:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  “[This new report finds] that the position of Artistic Director is held by far more men than women, while the position of Executive Director is much more equitably distributed. However, in both Artistic and Executive Director roles, men are compensated at a higher rate than their female counterparts.” (One prominent detail: Peter Martins earned way more than anyone else — though one must grant that New York City Ballet is three times the size of the country’s next larges
  
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• Scottish Government Gives Multi-Million Rescue Package To Edinburgh Festivals

  11-06-2021 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The Edinburgh festivals have been offered millions of pounds in emergency funding in the face of widespread fears they may never fully recover from the severe impacts of the COVID pandemic. The Fringe, international and book festivals, which help make up the world’s largest annual arts season, have been forced to very significantly curtail this August’s events, the second year running it has done so.” – The Guardian
  
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• Kim Jong-Un Is On The Warpath Against K-Pop

  11-06-2021 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Dear Respected Leader has “called it a ‘vicious cancer’ corrupting young North Koreans’ ‘attire, hairstyles, speeches, behaviors.’ His state media has warned that if left unchecked, it would make North Korea ‘crumble like a damp wall.’ After winning fans around the world, South Korean pop culture has entered the final frontier: North Korea, where its growing influence has prompted the leader of the totalitarian state to declare a new culture w
  
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• Damien Hirst’s death obsession and intimate visions of Amazon life – the week in art

  11-06-2021 15:00
  
  Hirst’s macabre dead-fly art, Claudia Andujar’s Yanomami photographs and Jimmy Robert’s history of the Caribbean – all in your weekly dispatchDamien Hirst: Relics and Fly Paintings
  The latest exhibition in Hirst’s year-long occupation of this space sees him at his most macabre and death-obsessed, from black paintings made with dead flies to a flayed statue of Saint Bartholomew.
  • Gagosian Britannia Street, London, until end of 2021. Continue reading...
  
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• Two Unknown Artemisia Gentileschi Paintings Have Turned Up In The Wreckage Of A Beirut Museum

  11-06-2021 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  Art historian Gregory Buchakjian did his Master’s thesis at the Sorbonne on the art collection of the Sursock Palace, where he identified two unattributed canvases as the work of the 17th-century Italian painter. With the decades-long turmoil in the Lebanese capital, Buchakjian and the rest of the world forgot about those two paintings — until the catastrophic explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020. In that disaster’s aftermath, the paintings were found in the ruined palace, da
  
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• Britain Now Has Its First All-Black-Female Shakespeare Troupe

  11-06-2021 14:06 via feedproxy.google.com
  Says actor Gabrielle Brooks, one of four co-founders of the Mawa Theatre Company, “Shakespeare remains a staple of British theatre. He’s still the most produced playwright in the world and I think if we want to tackle diversity, representation and inclusion, then why not start with the Bard himself? … If we can, as black British women, embed ourselves into the history of classical texts, then I think we can bring about real change.” – The Guardian
  
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• ‘He was aware of racist pigeonholes’: how Basquiat took inspiration from jazz, hip-hop and no wave

  11-06-2021 12:00
  
  Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat explores the artist’s relationship to music in three short filmsBefore Jean-Michel Basquiat became one of the leading art stars of the 1980s, he was a kid from Brooklyn thriving in the music and art scenes of downtown New York in the late 1970s.“Everyone was coexisting together, musicians and artists,” says Ed Patuto, the producer of Time Decorated: The Musical Influences of Jean-Michel Basquiat, three short films t
  
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• Should Humans Have Empathy For AI Machines?

  11-06-2021 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  Empathy, of course, is a two-way street, and we humans don’t exhibit a whole lot more of it for bots than bots do for us. Numerous studies have found that when people are placed in a situation where they can cooperate with a benevolent A.I., they are less likely to do so than if the bot were an actual person. – The New York Times
  
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