04.15.14 – ArtsJournal Wayback

The Bizarre Magic Of The World’s Greatest Kids’ (Is It Just For Kids?) TV Show

“Adventure Time is a smash hit cartoon aimed primarily at kids age six to eleven. It’s also a deeply serious work of moral philosophy, a rip-roaring comic masterpiece, and a meditation on gender politics and love in the modern world.”

French Court Swaps Bob Dylan Out Of Hate Speech Case

The case stems from a 2012 Rolling Stone interview in which, to some eyes, Dylan appeared to equate Croatians with Nazis. The judge ruled that, since Dylan gave the interview in the U.S., he couldn’t be liable – but the publisher of the French edition of Rolling Stone could.

What’s Wrong With The Metropolitan Opera? No, It’s WHO’S Wrong

In part three of a series on what’s ailing America’s flagship opera company and how to cure it, Dawn Fatale looks at engaging the public and at casting – and says the Met must stop casting five to six years in advance.

Study: Some Parts Of Our Brains Deteriorate Significantly After Age 24

“Using a piecewise regression analysis, we find that age-related slowing of within-game, self-initiated response times begins at 24 years of age,” the authors write. In other words, older players took longer to respond to new visual playing conditions before taking action. And, according to the study, it was “a significant performance deficit,” which likely has consequences even outside abstruse digital space wars.

There IS A Plan To Save San Diego Opera

“A sharply reduced budget, innovative programming and a list of donors who will step up if San Diego Opera’s current leaders are replaced might be enough to rescue the company from shutdown in two weeks, … [said] Carol Lazier, the San Diego Opera board member who pledged $1 million to save the company.”

Reopening Of Paris’s Picasso Museum Delayed Again

The Musée Picasso has been closed for renovations for more than four years. “The building site is all but ready, the lights for the art works are in place and except for a few minor technical items, everything is done,” according to the museum’s spokesperson, who gave neither an explanation for the delay nor a revised opening date.

West End’s ‘War Horse’ Won’t Have To Rehire Fired Musicians (Yet)

“Musicians who were made redundant from the National Theatre’s West End production of War Horse have failed to secure an interim injunction which they had hoped would allow them to return to work.”

The Kept Women Of 18th-Century Paris, And The Police Who Kept Tabs On Them

Europe’s first vice squad “compiled vast dossiers of information on the city’s elite sex workers and their patrons. But they rarely acted on that information. To this day, it remains a mystery why the Parisian police spent so much time and effort observing an underground economy it apparently had no interest in curtailing. But their files are an historian’s dream.”

The Rise of Japan’s Creepy-Cute Craze

“Long considered the global capital of cute, Japan is currently experiencing a boom in less-than-cuddly characters … Called kimo-kawaii, translated as ‘gross cute,’ the phenomenon … is part cultural backlash to Japan’s decades-long adorability binge, and part smart marketing tactic.”

Tag: 04.15.14