Category: today’s top story

“The company gives no reason for this exceedingly short notice, which leaves them having to advertise the third most significant job in British ballet within the next few days, and a precipitate appointment procedure only weeks after the departure of their managing director.”

“‘A lot of us are upset that Chávez has taken Sistema as his own child, and it’s not,’ said Gabriela Montero, a Venezuelan pianist with an international career who has written a piece, ‘Ex Patria,’ denouncing the Chávez government and the fraying of civil society here. ‘It’s almost like he’s stolen something that we lived with for the past 40 years and dirtied it with his presence.'”

“Marina Abramovic signed a deal with architect Rem Koolhaas earlier this week to design and construct her Center for the Preservation of Performance Art in Hudson, New York. … and the museum will be devoted to performance art pieces of ‘six hours minimum.’ Some of them will go on for days.”

“Corrugated tin roofs, ramshackle cinder-block huts, labyrinthine streets caked with garbage and rubble, the possibility of random violence at any turn. And this section of the Sarría barrio is not even bad for Caracas. … So just across the street from such blighted scenes young children with violins and French horns and trumpets filled the spaces of an elementary school on Tuesday.”

“A Sydney native who early on ran the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, Potts, 53, is currently the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge in England. He is best known in the U.S. for running the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, from 1998 to 2007.”

“Obama aims to boost outlays from $1.501 billion to $1.576 billion, encompassing the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities (NEA and NEH), the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the Smithsonian Institution, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the National Gallery of Art.”

“Dykk was one of the last of his breed, a classic old-style Critic, with a capital C. His reviews were impeccably written, incredibly witty, and often utterly withering.”

The portrait, which has been hanging in the Illinois Statehouse, isn’t of Mrs. Lincoln at all. “Bauman identifies the culprit behind the scam as Ludwig Pflum, who rechristened himself Lew Bloom and was given to the kind of self-invention that America became famous for during the industrial era. He worked as a jockey, circus clown, boxer and vaudevillian before settling on art collecting.”

The company “is being split by controversy over founder and artistic director Edward Villella’s earlier-than-expected retirement, announced last September in a way that shocked company members and the dance world. … [Some] board members, major donors and dancers are questioning the decision and contend he was forced out at the apex of his career.”

For years, research neurologists have been trying to determine what goes on in the brains of top athletes, performers and others when they attain “flow” – that fully engaged state of mind in which they achieve at peak level. Now US military researchers are trying to speed up the learning process (of, for example, expert snipers) by inducing “flow” with electric stimulation.