“The four-building, 19-acre ‘working center for citizenship,’ set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high ‘museum tower,’ a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill. … In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records,” which are to be digitized and posted online. – The New York Times
Tag: 02.20.19
Jerry Saltz: Having An Art Fair In L.A. Has Never Really Worked — Until Now
“I often say about art fairs that they are a spectacle of art having sex with money in public. At Frieze, they went at it like a gaggle of pent-up bonobo monkeys. And the sex was good. Or so I’m told. I only watch — amazed, jealous, contemptuous, self-hating, you know the drill.” – Vulture
The Gender Gap At The Top Of US Ballet Companies
“The Dance Data Project … has published a report on leadership pay among the 50 biggest ballet companies in the U.S, broken down by gender. Here are some of the most interesting findings.” – Dance Magazine
CBS Is Using Artificial Intelligence To Measure Viewers’ Emotional Reactions To Shows
With Canvs Surveys, CBS can now field more open-ended surveys and also expand the set of questions it includes on each one. The tool measures and categorizes consumers’ responses to characters, plot lines and other topics (like related shows), using a standard set of emotional tags such as “love,” “excited,” “bored,” “sad” or “anxious.” – Variety
Philosophy Need Not Be Dense And Unreadable, Does It?
Most people do not realise that Aristotle wrote works designed for the general public. If they did, then perhaps more philosophers would automatically assume that they needed to follow his example. – Aeon
Forget Living Your Best Life — Here’s An Argument For Living The Good-Enough Life
Western philosophers from Aristotle to Kant to Marx to Ayn Rand (okay, bear with us here) may have differed on what constitutes greatness, but all of them held it as an ideal. Avram Albert argues for a different goal, one espoused by Buddhist thinkers and Romantics (and which we might call the Lake Wobegon ideal): good enough. And even that is difficult. – The New York Times
J.P. Morgan’s Fixer-Upper: Conserving His Library, “A Building Unlike Any Other in New York”
Having reviewed the Morgan Library & Museum’s extensive 2010 renovation, I didn’t expect to be writing about another major Morgan re-do any time soon. – Lee Rosenbaum
‘Be More Chill’ And The Family That’s Been With It All Along
The sleeper-hit musical’s composer and lyricist, Joe Iconis, has kept around him a group of performers (who call themselves the Family) who’ve all been waiting for their big breaks together — and now that Iconis’s show is taking off, he’s keeping Family members on board, resisting every request to replace one of them with, say, a TV star. – The New York Times
Cinema Has Helped Change Europe, And It Can Do So Again: Agnieszka Holland
The maker of Oscar nominees Angry Harvest, Europa Europa, and In Darkness writes: “We film-makers are faced with the question of whether we can have a real impact on our world and how we go about doing that. If reality looks like bad fiction and if real characters are like caricatures, then our movies have to reinvent reality. In short: we should leave politicians by the wayside and let artists invent the future. Responsibility today means putting our imaginations to work.” – The Guardian
European Parliament Calls For Overhauling EU Rules On Restitution Of Looted Art
“A sweeping resolution passed by the parliament on 17 January addresses colonial- and Nazi-era looted art, as well as art looted in recent Middle Eastern conflicts. It proposes a pan-European meta-database of looted art, funding for provenance research, the establishment of alternative dispute resolution mechanisms and exemptions from statutes of limitations for Nazi-looted art claims.” – The Art Newspaper