The president’s plan to defund the arts (even further) should be a call to arms. But “because the arts seem glamorous, and can indeed be fulfilling and fun to do, it’s easy to regard them as something different — a lark, a hobby. The fact that some artists make art whether or not there’s money to be made might be taken as an argument that they don’t need to be paid because they’re just doing what they like. … But even crayons cost money.”
Tag: 04.01.17
Choral Music Is ‘Slow Food For The Soul,’ Says Nico Muhly
“One of the most moving things about this musical tradition is happening upon it: walking through London and ducking into St. Paul’s Cathedral, for instance, and hearing the buttery luxuriousness of one of Herbert Howells’s canticles.”
Why Are Dave Chappelle’s Netflix Specials So Painfully Unfunny?
Myles Johnson says follow the money: “Capitalism calls for you to be average and Dave Chappelle obeyed. It calls for you to be ignorant despite moments, even fleeting, of critical enlightenment.”
James Rosenquist, Pop Artist Whose Work Was Influenced By Advertising, Has Died At 83
Rosenquist, who had experience (and a day job) as a painter of billboards, “painted by hand in a lucidly simplified realistic style, [but] the juxtapositions of images remain mysterious. The paintings could be viewed both as critiques of modern consumerism and as glimpses into the collective American consciousness.”
The Cleveland Orchestra Had A Pretty Decent April Fool’s Joke For Its City
So apparently “Severance Hall sits atop a vast underground cavern and waterway system, like the Palais Garnier in ‘The Phantom of the Opera.'” Yup.
Turns Out Video Games Are *Not* Addictive
Wait. What? They’re really not, though. Playing in what seems like an addictive way “is normal behavior that, while perhaps in many cases a waste of time, is not damaging or disruptive of lives in the way drug or alcohol use can be.”
As The Dancers Move, A Projector Maps Their Faces And Makes Them Look Fairly Terrifying (And Amazing)
The high-speed projector works at 1,000 frames per minute, and “over the course of about one minute, the dancers are made to look like skulls with empty eye sockets, big-toothed clowns, and terrifying dolls with their jaws unhinged.”
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Siberian Poet Who Denounced Stalin And Inspired Millions, Has Died At 83
The poet, who “often declaimed with sweeping gestures to thousands of excited admirers in public squares, sports stadiums and lecture halls” in the years soon after Stalin died, ended his own days in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he had been for many years a professor at the University of Tulsa.