04.08.15 – Page 2 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Toronto Symphony CEO Breaks Silence Over Buying Out Valentina Lisitsa’s Contract

Jeff Melanson: “We did not go public with this story because we were trying to protect Valentina and her reputation. We are now going public because she basically forced the issue on us and now we are speaking to you.”

Pianist Says Toronto Symphony Donor Threatened To Cut Funds If She Performed

“Valentina Lisitsa, whose appearances were cancelled this week by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra because of tweets she posted about the Ukrainian crisis, says the TSO told her agent a donor threatened to withhold funds if she performed as scheduled.”

This Female Comedian Does An Hour Of Rape Jokes Every Night (With No Pants On)

Adrienne (“I do wear a jacket and heels – I’m not ridiculous”) Truscott: “And what is my right to do it – because I’m a woman? A comedian? Journalists ask me if I’ve been raped. A fair question in a way, or does it reveal an assumption based on my material: that I couldn’t simply be a comedian doing an hour of pointed observational comedy. Would being raped give me the right to joke about rape? No, anyone has the right to do it, but it could make my observational comedy about it more incisive.”

The ‘Netflix For Books’ Opens A (Big) eBookstore – And It’s Not (Just) About Competing With Amazon

“Tell me, what do you think is the most common reason given for cancelling a subscription ebook service like Oyster? If you answered ‘I can’t find the ebooks I want’ then you won the prize. … But now Oyster can promise to sell the ebooks which it was unable to lend, and that is going to keep some subscribers from leaving.”

How I Found Georges Perec’s Lost Novel

David Bellos: “Preparing for [a] move in spring 1966, [Perec] stuffed redundant paperwork into a cardboard suitcase intended for the dump, and put his literary papers in a different case of similar appearance. In the move, the wrong case got junked. All of Perec’s manuscripts and typescripts prior to the writing of Things disappeared. The story led me to expect I would never get to read those lost works.”

Washington Ballet Launches Program To Develop Dancers And Choreographers Of Color

Artistic director Septime Webre says that the new project, called “Let’s Dance Together,” isn’t “just about community outreach and scholarships … [It’s] to try to build an integrated faculty, and an integrated company so dancers can see themselves in the grownups onstage.”

These 20 Buildings Point To The Future Of Architecture

“There’s a tremendous variety. Some, like Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower, are feats of form—her 82-story Chicago skyscraper is elevated to the realm of massive sculpture by the addition of curving balconies that jut out from the rectangular base. Others, like Neri Oxman’s pavilion made from silkworm thread, give us a sense of how new materials and digital fabrication techniques could be used to build tomorrow’s structures.”

Ronald Lauder: Still Much To Do In Returning Nazi-Looted Art

“Citing the statute of limitations to hold on to a painting that was forcibly taken by the Nazis is not just wrong—it is immoral. There should be no statute of limitations in the case of Nazi-looted art, just as there is no statute of limitations for genocide, because for almost every stolen painting, a felony murder was committed and a family was destroyed.”

Humorist Stan Freberg, 88

“Mr. Freberg was a hard man to pin down. He made hit comedy records, voiced hundreds of cartoon characters and succeeded Jack Benny in one of radio’s most prestigious time slots. He called himself a “guerrilla satirist,” using humor as a barbed weapon to take on issues ranging from the commercialization of Christmas to the hypocrisy of liberals.”

Tag: 04.08.15