I’ve found strikingly few resources available in any media about the craft, practice, and management of arts organizations in the live performing arts (beyond the usual-suspect books). So I’ve started a series of video interviews with performing arts professionals. First up is Pamela Tatge, who took the reins at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in 2016. – Andrew Taylor
Tag: 03.11.19
Kara Walker Chosen As Next Artist For Tate Modern’s Turbine Room Commission
Frances Morris, the Tate Modern director, said: “Kara Walker fearlessly tackles some of the most complex issues we face today. Her work addresses history and identity with a powerful directness, but also with great understanding, nuance and wit. Seeing her respond to the industrial scale of the Turbine Hall – and the wider context of London and British history – is a hugely exciting proposition.” – The Guardian
Misty Copeland On Erica Lall
Copeland’s colleague at American Ballet Theatre used to be a kid looking up to her – and Copeland is impressed with the adult Lall: “Erica is very mature in terms of knowing what she wants and being assertive in a way that I think really works — especially as a Black dancer. There’s a fine line between maintaining your identity, and not becoming someone you’re not just to fit in with a certain culture.” – Refinery29
How Fox News Became The Propaganda Arm Of The Trump White House
Strange as it may seem today, there was a point at which the network was very skeptical of Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. Now Fox News personalities appear with Trump at political events and give him policy advice, both on and off the air. Jane Mayer does a deep dive into how the change happened, who tried to keep it at bay (Roger Ailes!), and who chose not to stop it. – The New Yorker
Reading In The 1940s: Let’s Not Idealize it – But There Are Some Fascinating Lessons About Culture
George Hutchinson’s first chapter, “When Literature Mattered,” summarizes a brief era unlike any other, when Americans of all classes and backgrounds turned hungrily to novels, plays, and poems, provoked by a “need to recapture the meaning of personal experience.” Soldiers who had never picked up a book now read free Armed Services Editions paperbacks—more than a hundred million came off the presses from 1943 to 1947—first for relief from wartime tedium, then because the books offered them new ways to understand their relationships and inner lives. Educated readers, meanwhile, grew impatient with both the collectivist ethos and the formalist aesthetics that had governed intellectual life a few years earlier. Later, after the 1940s ended, literature lost its importance in general culture—it no longer mattered—partly because, as Hutchinson writes, “other media drew leisure-time attention,” but also because it “became increasingly (but not exclusively) a professional specialization supported by universities.” – New York Review of Books