“For the new museums that have opened with an old name, it’s important to ask: what do they get for the money – and is it worth it? They don’t always get the good stuff in return. It is estimated that Boris Johnson would need to raise £33 million for the Smithsonian in East London, and experience should tell us that such estimates are usually unrealistic and low.”
Tag: 02.02.15
Should New York City Opera Be Revived? (Where’s The Upside?)
“Can NYCO-R compete with smaller innovative works such as “Why is Eartha Kitt trying to Kill Me?” at the fashionable (le) Poisson Rouge, or the sexy twist on opera that Operotica and L’Opera Burlesque offer? Does New York need another “major” opera company and will a resurrected NYCO will be able to find its footing in the even more crowded field of smaller opera companies and recapture even a modicum of its former glory?”
Don’t Worry About Artificial Intelligence Ending The World, But Do Worry About Your Job
“We’re entering a ‘second machine age,’ where the accelerating rate of change brought on by digital technologies could leave millions of medium-and-low skilled workers behind.”
When The Culture Wars Really Mattered
It is hard to avoid a feeling of nostalgia for the virulent days of the “culture wars,” when participants on different sides of the debate shared a common conviction about the importance of a humanist education.
They’ve Found Michelangelo’s Only Surviving Metal Sculptures
“Two handsome, virile naked men riding triumphantly on ferocious panthers … Academics in Cambridge will suggest that [this] pair of mysterious metre-high sculptures known as the Rothschild Bronzes are by the master himself, made just after he completed David and as he was about to embark on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.”
So Just What Features Led Scholars To Attribute These Bronzes To Michelangelo?
A look at the evidence – sculptural, thematic, biographical, cultural, pictorial, and graphic.
America’s Existential Crisis, As Illustrated By Super Bowl Ads
“[It’s] the kind of existential crisis that only God’s iPhone, Marshawn Lynch’s Skittles, and a car with an erection can heal. America is hangry [sic]. America can’t sleep. America is very, very worried about getting old and irrelevant and physically stuck on the couch shouting at a football game while other, younger countries are going to super-cool Pac Man parties and flipping tires over for no discernible reason and seducing elderly wives in leopard-print camisoles.”
Pianist Aldo Ciccolini Dead At 89
“A passionate champion of French composers, he recorded more than 50 albums, mostly of French repertoire, and along the way championed many underrepresented French composers, especially Erik Satie.”
A Brief History Of Loving To Read
“For a long time, people didn’t love literature. They read with their heads, not their hearts (or at least they thought they did), and they were unnerved by the idea of readers becoming emotionally attached to books and writers. It was only over time, Lynch writes – over the century roughly between 1750 and 1850 – that reading became a ‘private and passional’ activity, as opposed to a ‘rational, civic-minded’ one.”
Technicolor At 100 – It Changed Visual Storytelling Forever
“There’s some irony in the fact that colorizing film – ostensibly to make it look more like the real world – may have cemented the medium’s dreamy, escapist quality. The three-color process, in particular, created films punctuated by colors so electric they were surreal.”