“The Spanish Ministry of Culture had declared that the work” – the 18th-century Codex Trujillo, also called the Codex Martínez Compañón – “is an important piece of Spanish heritage, preventing its export to Peru following its sale at auction to the Museo de Arte de Lima (MALI). The move provoked an uproar in the Latin American museum world. Now, as a solution, Spain will loan the work to Peru indefinitely without giving up ownership.”
Tag: 06.20.17
Medieval Scholars Believed In Parallel Universes
But weirdly, they only got there after the Catholic Church banned many Aristotelian ideas as heretical. “Among the ideas that Tempier condemned was a principle of Aristotelian thought that held that the ‘first cause’ (or, as medieval scholars would have said, God) could not have made more than one world.”
A Kind Of Language Linguists Thought Would Be Impossible (And You’d Agree), But It Exists
“One core property of human languages is known as duality of patterning: meaningful linguistic units (such as words) break down into smaller meaningless units (sounds), so that the words sap, pass, and asp involve different combinations of the same sounds, even though their meanings are completely unrelated. …Try inventing a lexicon of tens of thousands of distinct noises, all of which are easily distinguished, and you will probably find yourself wishing you could simply re-use a few snippets of sound in varying arrangements.” But there’s a language that does manage without duality of patterning: it developed on its own, relatively recently, in the Negev Desert.
What Do We Know About Shakespeare’s Politics?
Not a lot because, well, he was a playwright. But “some themes recur; and some messages in the action of his plays are too powerful to miss. Such themes are most abundant in the four plays written at the height of Shakespeare’s powers. In Polonius’s classification, they are tragical-comical-historical. They are about the state in moments of stress, and about individual men acting politically. In these four plays, six themes emerge.”
Is The Controversy Over Hedy Weiss’ Chicago Theatre Review Overblown?
Theater is of course a highly public endeavor, and the world outside is a big bad place, with lions and tigers and critics who have opinions. If its practitioners want safety, they should practice their craft behind closed doors.
Why Performance Art Has Become A Hot New Thing (Again)
As performance art becomes more popular, it is changing. Many are embracing elements of dance, film, theatre and sculpture, even street theatre and rap music. “Performance art was stuck in the 1970s: protest, people cutting themselves,” RoseLee Goldberg, the founder of Performa, said last year. “Some years ago I wondered: why don’t we have visually dazzling, emotional and intellectually challenging performance? Why does everything have to be a single gesture performed on the Lower East Side?”
Turning Simon Rattle Into A Digital Abstract
“The London Symphony Orchestra teamed with techies from the University of Portsmouth and Vicon Motion Systems, who captured Rattle’s movements while conducting, appropriately, Elgar’s Enigma Variations. Digital artist Tobias Gremmler was then called in to convert the gestures into animated films.”
A ‘Bechdel Test’-Style Rating To Cover Gender Stereotyping
“Founded in 2003, Common Sense Media provides parents with an online rating system that suggests age-appropriate shows for children, highlighting those that underscore admirable character traits like courage, empathy and perseverance. On Tuesday it will introduce a new metric: the portrayal of gender. At its website, a symbol with the phrase ‘positive gender representations’ will appear with a film or TV show, meaning that reviewers judged it to prompt boys and girls to think beyond traditional gender roles.”
Residents Of Venice Vote Overwhelmingly To Ban Cruise Ships
More than 18,000 people voted at 60 polling booths set up by activists and 17,874 chose to eject the ships, which are accused of shaking the delicate foundations of Venice’s venerable palazzi.
Artists Must Realize They Have A Role In Gentrification (And What To Do About It)
“We recognize that art is an industry with a structural reality that must be acknowledged in order for artists to challenge their complicity in the displacement of long term residents in low-income and working class neighborhoods and fight against this. It’s important that people see the devastating impacts of securing housing in working class and poor neighborhoods, and setting up investment properties posing as art spaces.”