“What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?”
Tag: 06.08.15
Tenure Is Going Down In Flames. Does It Matter?
“What I wonder is whether justice and tenure can exist side-by-side in discussions of academic labor. At best, they rest next to one another uneasily. At worst, tenure is now reliant upon the stratified academic workplace to exist.”
The Genius Of ClickHole: How The Onion Spinoff Designed To Mock The Internet Became The Best Thing On It
Dan Kois: “How does the site, with its small staff of young writers and editors tucked around a few tables at the Onion‘s Chicago offices, generate so many stories that make me laugh really hard? And why do so many of these stories also make me feel bad? And what does it mean to make a website that does both of these things – that makes extremely viral media, while ruthlessly satirizing the world of viral media?”
Just How Do You Dance To Jazz? (Once It was Common)
“Yes, the musicians have to keep an underlying dance pulse going if they want listeners to get out of their chairs and shake their hips. But the venue also has to provide an open space where that can happen without blocking the view of others. And the audience has to be able to identify the beat within a jazz number that has a lot of different moving parts. In New Orleans, audiences are trained by family and friends to hear that dance pulse from an early age.”
Ratmansky Strips The Varnish Off “Sleeping Beauty”
In the twentieth century there was a strong anti-narrative trend in some quarters of the ballet world: storytelling was seen as corny. Consequently, a great deal of the mime, or hand-talk, in the nineteenth-century ballets was dropped. According to Alexei Ratmansky, this was definitely the case with “The Sleeping Beauty.” In the movement score he found much more mime than we see in today’s productions, and he says he restored every scrap of it.
Street Names – So Much More Than Labels For A Map
“Street names are the lyrics to accompany the symphonies that all cities perform, day-in day-out, and their integrity ought to be respected. Maybe they do have more of a function after all than to simply help people tell one street from another.”
In The Age Of Curators New Music Could Use Some Curation
“While, historically, the curator was the person at a museum in charge of caring for that museum’s collection of artwork, this has only been a partial description of part of the profession for some time. Now, art curators are often at the forefront of enabling creative innovation and audience interaction. In the world of new music, on the other hand, curating is mostly a word we’ve usurped for use in funding applications and marketing materials.”
Poland’s Government Made A Huge Investment In New Concert Halls, Museums (So What About Audiences?)
“The investments have generated a remarkable audience boom. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of museum visitors rose from 17.5m to 29.0m, visitors to art galleries from 3.0m to 4.5m and audiences for theatres and concerts from 9.3m to 11.5m.”
Here’s Who Bought The Most Expensive Sculpture Ever Auctioned
Shortly after Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger distracted us all by selling for $179 million, an anonymous bidder paid $141.3 million for Giacometti’s L’homme au doigts (Pointing Man). Who was he? One of the likeliest suspects, as it happens.
Why We Need Our Writers To Be Audacious
“It is therefore necessary that writers everywhere should see it as their ultimate duty to preserve artfulness of language by couching audacious prose. Our prose should be the Noah’s ark that preserves language in a world that is being apocalyptically flooded with trite and weightless words.”