“Many within Hollywood, like Albert Lewin, director of The Moon and Sixpence, were keen to work with the famed surrealist, yet these offers of collaboration rarely came to much. ‘Man Ray was very firm,’ [curator Max] Teicher says. ‘If he was going to do a film, he was going to do everything: the lighting, the set design, everything. They [Hollywood insiders] looked at him like he was crazy, because that’s not how Hollywood worked.”
Tag: 01.16.17
How The Great German And Austrian Orchestras Became Tools Of Propaganda
“The alchemy of the transformation began with a gradual relinquishment of autonomy, especially stark in Berlin. The Berlin Philharmonic, nationalized into a state-owned company in January 1934 under Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, began to perform in the old Philharmonie on Bernburger Straße under an immense swastika. It was now expected to render service to “the German cause.” (Even Goebbels did not speak of “Nazi music” but of “German music.”) Goebbels, who began to call it “my orchestra,” increased its subsidies and its musicians’ salaries and personally signed letters of exemption from military service for its members.”
Just What, Exactly, Is “Popular” Music?
Of the countless terms for categories of music, the least useful phrase I know is “popular music.” It provides no information about the music itself: no suggestion of how it sounds or what mood it might conjure, no indication of the traditions it grows from or defies, and no hint of whether it could be good for dancing, for solitary listening, or for anything else.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves And What They Reveal (Whether We Want To Admit It Or Not)
“We tell stories that make us seem adventurous, or funny, or strong” – or virtuous or stoic or oppressed. “We tell stories that make our lives seem interesting. And we tell these stories not only to others, but also to ourselves. … If we reflect on the stories we tell about ourselves, both to others and to ourselves, we may well find out things about who we are that complicate the view we would prefer to be identified with. Why might this matter? Here is one reason.”
Dancing To The Oldies – A Choreographed Run Through The Met Museum
Dance has become a popular acquisition of museums in recent years. Immersive, participatory, and often silly, “The Museum Workout” could be seen as a cheeky response to the trend. But the work also tackles serious questions that dance artists have long been asking about the relationship between artists and audiences and about what constitutes dance.
Theastre Gates On Re-Visioning The Art Of Art
“It is a time-honored role for artist as designator, to point at the stuff of the physical world and revision it as art, harkening back to the readymade. But Gates’s decision to ‘bump off from art’ and live ‘in the sphere of dirt, the dirty, the stuff that we think is in the ground’ was revelatory, leading to invitations to Davos and a TED Talk, where he talked about how he revived a neighborhood with imagination and hard graft.”
Despite Everything They’ve Tried, ‘Hamilton’ Tickets In London Still Got Snapped Up By Scalpers
The producers went to a lot of trouble to institute a paperless system that would keep tickets off the price-gouging resale market. That worked for (literally) less than two hours.
The Ideas We Aren’t Hearing – Africa? India?
“Non-European thought is often underrepresented in philosophy. The rich histories of India, China, the Islamic world, and Africa are often seen as footnotes and side ventures to the thinkers of Europe. While European thought is of great use, the influence of African ideas on Freud, the influence of Maoism on many French philosophers, and the refinement of Greek ideas by Islamic thinkers cannot be denied.”
The Books That Have Experimented With What A Book Is
Irma Boom has been undertaking “a quixotic, endless undertaking of creating a library of what she called ‘only the books that are experimental.’ Above her studio here, the recently opened library is made up almost entirely of books from the 1600s and 1700s, and the 1960s and ’70s.
People Are Extremely Loyal To Groups That Haze Newcomers – Why?
“Why do unpleasant hazing practices manage to remain so appealing that individuals are willing to risk legal punishment, injury and even death to keep the practices alive?” Anthropologist Christopher Kavanagh looks to the phenomena of cognitive dissonance, social glue and “costly signals” for explanations.