“If the movie Bean has taught us anything (and what hasn’t it taught us really?), it’s that American museums and the museum-going public will line up, go out of its way, to view something spectacular, whether there’s much in the way of educational value.” Noah Charney (who cops to similar behavior himself) talks with some curators about “what you as a curator do when the material in your collection is more interesting than spectacular.”
Tag: 06.11.17
The CIA’s Failed Attempts To Shape Intellectual Discourse
“Its history suggests that the midcentury intellectuals whose work filled the pages of these journals, brilliant though they were, should not have their status inflated to the point of distortion. Ironically, the same thing that made them important — their ability to participate in a seemingly world-historic conflict of ideas — was what compromised their integrity.”
How The Concertgebouw Is Changing The Audience Experience
“The challenge is to show the world that everyone is welcome at the Concertgebouw and to bring more people through the doors that haven’t visited before – but that would love to come irrespective of their backgrounds. I think at all times we should avoid thinking that we should change our artistic core to attract more audiences – eschewing, for instance, those fusion concerts and crossover concerts that seldom seem to work out well.”
The President Emerita Of MoMA Sold A Lichtenstein To Start A Criminal Justice Fund – And She Wants Other Collectors To Add To It
“‘This is one thing I can do before I die,’ [Agnes] Gund, 78, said in an interview at her Upper East Side apartment, where the Lichtenstein used to hang over the mantel, along with works by Jasper Johns and Mark Rothko. ‘This is what I need to do.'”
How Did This Character From An Australian Horror Film Become A Pride Month Icon?
A half-ironic Tumblr post from October has changed The Babadook forever: “In recent weeks, the Babadook-as-queer-icon has gone from a internet in-joke to a Pride Month figurehead, with remixed representations of the monster he appears in a storybook in the film featuring in celebrations online and off.”
How To Turn Off – And On – Creativity, According To Successful Google Engineers
Google learned early on to devote time to training its people to relax – and that was for business purposes. “Meditation and other restful practices don’t just help workers disconnect—they may boost innovation, too.”
Poet Edith Shiffert Dies At 101
“Ms. Shiffert was a quiet sensualist, her verse characterized by spare simplicity and a deep, abiding affinity with the natural world. Her poems were inclined to be short (she was keenly influenced by haiku), and were often organized around unobtrusive — and therefore highly effective — rhyme or half-rhyme, the prosodic device in which two words are united by a shared final sound.”
Selma Hayek Is Getting Starring Roles At 50, But How?
Hayek says: “I have a friend — an Italian friend who’s a brilliant actress … she’s working a lot, too, and we were looking at each other one day and saying, why are we working so much? And she said: ‘You know why? We don’t have Botox!’ … We don’t have the injections. This is what it is! We don’t look as hot, that’s true … but we’re working non-stop because we can look like real people. We can play any part.”
No Matter How Many Confederate Monuments Are Removed, The True History Of The South Is Not Being Erased
And that’s true anywhere: “It’s not just the dragon-haunted South. Everywhere I have visited or lived — in Eugene, OR; Albuquerque, NM; St. Louis, MO; Chapel Hill, NC; New Smyrna Beach, FL —
history of this sort is right at a visitor’s feet, etched into earth and rock, embodied in churches and homes, and interred in tombs.”
All Of The Winners – Expected And Surprises – At The Tonys
Basically, it was the night of Dear Evan Hansen, at least on the musical side.