Category: AJBlogs

Think you (or your organization) don’t understand the people you are trying to reach? If you are talking about people other than your current attendees/donors and their peers, you are 100% correct; and they understand you even less. (And if you don’t think you don’t understand you are probably deluding yourself.) – Doug Borwick

It’s kind of calling-for-immediate-attention bell that invites a sharp smack with palm or finger, and drives Basil Fawlty to the very verge of derangement. Ping! It’s a comedy device – an indicator of short-fuse entitlement, an enhancer of retro-farce chaos. It retains its comic tinge in Amsterdam, which is unnerving, given the context. – David Jays

Q: How do you invite thieves to steal a famous, expensive, publicly exhibited artwork? A: Publicly announce that no guards are protecting it. – Lee Rosenbaum

Dave Douglas is a trumpeter whose adherence to basic jazz values fully justifies the title of the new album he shares with pianist Uri Caine and drummer Andrew Cyrille in their unusual trio. Unusual? Yes. – Doug Ramsey

Dvořák predicted that a ‘great and noble school’ of American classical music would arise from ‘Negro melodies.’ But the black musical motherlode migrated to popular genres; American classical music stayed white. The reasons are both obvious and not. – Joe Horowitz

When I attended the celebratory press conference in 2015 that announced multiple major benefactions to the Met’s Asian Art Department, little did I know that a few years later the Met would auction off a good chunk of those lauded gifts. – Lee Rosenbaum

The beginning of a new academic year feels like a good time to work on making all of these resources more widely known. ArtsEngaged has the following available for people in the field who want to support community engagement. – Doug Borwick

Rondi Marsh, The Pink Room
Bill O’Connell And The Afro-Caribbean Ensemble,
Wind Off The Hudson (Savant)
– Doug Ramsey

It remains to be seen whether his cultural benefactions will be augmented by bequests. I’m guessing that museums on the receiving end of such bequests, unless encumbered by unacceptable conditions, won’t abjure them as toxic. Nor should they. – Lee Rosenbaum

In Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, Roz Chast has some advice about hoarding: Don’t hold onto anything you don’t want your kids to have to sort through once you’re gone. For the Lafayette family in Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate, it’s an album stuffed with vintage photos of lynchings from the American south. – David Jays