Tag: 03.13.18

Paris’s Museum Of Decorative Arts, Tired Of Being Confused With Other Institutions, Rebrands

“The Musée des Arts Décoratifs has long had an identity crisis. It is in a 19th-century wing of the Louvre building … but it does not belong to the Louvre. It gets confused with the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, the elite national school for art and design on the other side of the Seine River, even though there is no connection between the two institutions. And it is not a museum dedicated to the early 20th-century Art Deco movement, even though ‘Art Deco’ is shorthand for ‘Arts Décoratifs.’ So in January, in an effort to reinvent itself, the museum changed its name.”

Movie Criticism Is Better Than Ever, But Good Movies Still Fall Through The Cracks

“In the past decade, film criticism has become better than ever, by which I don’t mean that every critic writing is better than those of the past but that criticism is better over all—more critics than ever have actually seen many classic movies and a wide range of current ones, because cinephilia, an ardor for wide-ranging moviegoing, is now a core premise for even attempting criticism. (The gap between aesthetically advanced young critics and op-ed think-piecers is even more conspicuous than ever.) Above all, there’s a wider and stronger strain of curiosity, a deeper variety of interests that goes together with a younger set of critics who possess a wider variety of backgrounds and experiences, which makes it altogether less likely that a great movie will meet a solid tsunami of critical dismissal—and the sharing of views far and wide on social media, especially on Twitter, helps to get word around among critics as well as viewers.”

Public Art For Common Good

Nonprofits generally don’t create their own elaborate art to rally more community support. Most have limited budgets, which necessitates putting time, money, and effort into programming first, in order to impact the communities they’re serving. Still, more funders are thinking up creative ways to use the medium.

This Nobel-Winning Doctor Was A Draftsman Up There With Michelangelo, Says Jerry Saltz

“Santiago Ramón y Cajal …, whose work in his field can be compared to Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur in theirs, is also among the best draftsmen of the 20th century. If his penciled linear, fractalizing networks and abstract webs were inserted into any art museum’s early-20th-century permanent collection they would stop people in their tracks and vie with the best the museum has to offer.”

The Internet Has Failed Us As Public Space

Not long ago, the scientists and software developers who pioneered the World Wide Web thought it would democratize publishing and usher in a more open, educated and thoughtful chapter of history. But while the Internet and its offshoot technologies have improved society and daily life in many ways, they have been an unmitigated disaster for the way we communicate and learn.

Once Upon A Time In Egypt, When Ballet Flourished

“This flowering of ballet in Egypt, an East-meets-West tale of Cold War cultural politics, happened long ago, in the 1960s and early ’70s. … The Egyptian ballerina Magda Saleh danced the dream role of Giselle in Moscow as a guest star with the mighty Bolshoi Ballet … and in the opera house in her hometown, Cairo – where to call a woman a ‘dancer’ was an insult – with a full troupe of Egyptians trained by Russians in an academy established by the Egyptian state.”