“The arts are an expression of the human condition, and the county is missing out on the voices that make up a significant part of who we are in Los Angeles. In an effort to remedy this, the Los Angeles County Arts Commission has come out with a landmark report on the Cultural Equity and Inclusion Initiative (CEII), an 18-month public process that led to the development of 13 recommendations to the LA County Board of Supervisors to improve cultural equity and inclusion for the staffs, boards, artists, programming and audiences in our region.”
Tag: 05.08.17
A Return To Complexity? Signs That Today’s Audiences May Want More
“Young people’s brains aren’t experiencing a backward evolution. Their ability to articulate points of rhythm, melody and the flow of words in musical genres they have made or developed themselves prove that, as human beings, our urge for musical expression and facility lies deep. Young people are not afraid of things that need to be worked through. Complexity, curiosity and adventure is the new counter-culture.”
How Europe’s Refugee Crisis Is Playing Out On German Stages
Germany has a long history of political theater. But the influx of refugees since 2015 – what some have called the greatest humanitarian catastrophe of our era – has created new challenges for depicting crisis on stage, from striking the right balance between political activism and artistic creation, to figuring out the best way to reflect events as they unfold. The result has been a German theater scene that has doubled as a platform for political action – one that blurs the lines between social work, radical activism and art.
Writers Used To Be Private, Reclusive Even. Now They’re Expected To Be Public, And That’s A Problem
“We used to be okay with literary types asserting independent, fortified egos. Poets and novelists were almost expected to be aloof, even anti-social. But today, we’re too savvy to indulge such a romantic myth. The aloof rebel is nothing more than an affectation, we tell ourselves, a pair of Ray-Bans you slip on. When Bob Dylan was slow to acknowledge his Nobel Prize for Literature, many were scandalized. “It’s impolite and arrogant,” huffed a member of the Swedish Academy. What, then, has displaced the idiosyncratic recluse?”
How A New Amazon Selling Tweak Is Cutting Out Many Independent Book Sellers
“I finally clued in to how problematic this policy is a couple weeks ago when one of my authors emailed me to inform me that her book was no longer being listed on Amazon—at all—as available from her publisher, in this case SparkPress, one of my company’s two imprints. When you typed in the title of her book, the only listings that came up were from third-party sellers. Amazon’s policy states that “eligible sellers will be able to compete for the buy box,” but in this case, we had been completely wiped off of Amazon as an eligible seller in any capacity, without being notified.”
A New Era Of Battling Art Fairs Is Devouring The Art World
“We are in a market phase where galleries are mere cogs in an overarching global fair machine, which has become the predominant platform to showcase and direct-market art (with Instagram as the unwitting media partner). And, undeniably, the fact that fairs are now the art world’s supply chain has had a Darwinian impact on the art.”
You’d Rather See/Read/Listen To “Junk” Culture Than Art Culture? Don’t Feel Bad…
A critical consensus forms and then is eventually replaced by a new one. What matters in the end is whether you are moved by something or not – it’s the only mark of quality that you can be sure of. To argue for the binning of established canons to make way for the lionisation of, say, Dumb and Dumber and 90210 would be absurd, yet it is just as daft to deny that “low” culture can have a powerful, and therefore equally valid, effect on us.
Maybe Beauty And Pleasure In Animals Did Not Evolve Solely To Stimulate Reproduction
“Most [evolutionary biologists] see outrageous sexual traits” – say, beautiful plumage and elaborate mating rituals in birds – “as reliable advertisements. The logic goes that only the fittest manakins could coordinate their movements just so. Only the healthiest peacocks could afford to carry such a cumbersome tail. Their displays and dances hint at their good genes, allowing females to make adaptive decisions. But [ornithologist Richard] Prum says that view is poorly supported by years of research, and plainly makes no sense when you actually look at what birds do.”
The Thalidomide Baby Who Grew Up To Be A Rock Drummer, Tae Kwon Do Black Belt, TV Actor, And Richard III
“As an actor-producer [Mat Fraser] has been responsible for such deliberately provocative projects as Thalidomide!! A Musical and the first ‘cripsploitation’ action-movie Kung Fu Flid: Unarmed but Dangerous.” Richard III would seem an ideal role for him, but after he moved to New York and got a role on American Horror Story: Freak Show, he thought it was a role he’d never play: “To be honest I’d begun to feel a bit like yesterday’s cripple. I wasn’t sure if I’d be offered a straight acting role in England again.” (He was.)
Leisure And Arts In North Korea (Yes, They Do Have Them, More Or Less)
Reporter Laya Maheshwari: “I travelled to North Korea in September last year [and] attended the state’s showpiece film festival in Pyongyang, and visited a pizzeria, a water park and a pub, as well as other destinations in and around the capital. In many societies, lights going out in an auditorium induces a sense of anonymity and spontaneity. Sure enough, the hours I spent in a North Korean cinema provided my most natural encounters with locals.”