03.16.15 – Page 2 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Conceptual Art? How About A Conceptual Store?

“A lot of people won’t be purchasing actual products, so we want the online representation to be just as compelling as the objects themselves.”

Sotheby’s Finds Its New CEO At Madison Square Garden

“The art auction behemoth announced Monday that it has tapped Tad Smith, who has served as president and CEO of the Madison Square Garden Co. since 2014. Smith will officially assume his post at Sotheby’s on March 31.”

How Cate Blanchett Actually Redeems Cinderella’s Stepmother

“Lady Tremaine’s abuse of Cinderella is not the result, her performance makes clear, of some sui generis malevolence; it is instead the direct result of the cruelties her own life has heaped upon her. And those, in turn, are the direct result of her being a woman.”

Older Americans Are Flocking To The Stage

“The 50-plus crowd is stage-struck. Across the country, growing numbers of older adults are joining theater companies and signing up for classes in acting, directing and playwriting. Many – empty-nesters or newly retired – have never set foot on a stage and are seeking new outlets. But many others … caught the acting bug in high school or college, before pursuing other (paying) careers.”

Did An Australian Conservator Forge Two (Or More) Paintings That Sold For Millions?

“Police say the paintings, which sold for $2.5m and $1.1m respectively, were created in 2007 and 2008. [Brett] Whiteley died from a drug overdose in 1992.”

‘Original’ Isn’t Key To New Music – But It’s Got To Be Fresh

“Most of us don’t want total originality in music; we want small variations and hybrids of known ideas, a delicate balance between novelty and familiarity. That balance will tilt one way or the other, depending on the listener.”

How Lesbian Was Sappho, Really?

There’s an awful lot of hearsay (many centuries’ worth), much of it conflicting, and just about no direct evidence. Even the surviving poems themselves aren’t clear: were they personal outpourings of passion or lyrics meant for public performance by a chorus? Daniel Mendelsohn looks at the facts we have.

Mario Vargas Llosa And His Peru

“His books ignore none of Peru’s clashing, kaleidoscopic elements, but his vision, sometimes explicit and more often artistically indirect, is at bottom a gentlemanly, non-millenarian one … Humans, to him, are just another type of ‘fauna,’ a word that Vargas Llosa went on to use in novel after novel, not with detachment or revulsion but, rather, with a sort of zookeeper’s tenderness for his charges.”

The World’s Most Eccentric Library

It is a library like no other in Europe—in its cross-disciplinary reference, its peculiarities, its originality, its strange depths and unexpected shallows. Magic and science, evil eyes and saints’ lives: these things repose side by side in a labyrinth of imagery and icons and memory. Dan Brown’s hero Robert Langdon supposedly teaches “symbology” at Harvard. There is no such field, but if there were, and if Professor Langdon wanted to study it before making love to mysterious Frenchwomen and nimbly avoiding Opus Dei hit men, this is where he would come to study.

Tag: 03.16.15