A Twin Cities theatre that offered free admission saw a steep rise in attendance, in the percentage of attendees under age 30 and in the percentage of people of color at its shows. Sure, it lost money by not selling tickets – but it’s going to do the same thing next year.
Tag: 06.23.12
Shepard Fairey Takes His Street Art To London
“The natural territory of the street artist Shepard Fairey would seem to be as all-American as it gets. Emerging from the country’s skateboarding scene, he achieved global prominence with his much copied, much parodied Hope poster displaying a stylised Barack Obama in shades of blue and red.” Which is why he was in north London making a mural, of course.
Hypnotized By Her Own Work (And Hoping Others Are Too)
Artist Sarah Sze: “I am aware people might dismiss my art, but I’m interested in getting them to stop and look. … The pieces in this show appear to measure space, or time, and now that I have two children, time is more significant. It has more weight.”
Technology, Digital (And Occasionally Live) Musicians Connect Science To The Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen: “The power of the installation is that it places no demands on you. If you hate it, you leave after 30 seconds. If you like it, you stay for two hours, three hours. For me personally, the best experience was to see two old ladies in their 80s banging the hell out of the bass drum, trying to hit the off-beats and shrieking with joy like little girls.”
Pop Culture, Out Of The Closet
It’s Pride Month in the U.S. In the 15 years since Ellen DeGeneres came out on the cover of Time Magazine, here are some cultural markers for actors and musicians who are – and sometimes suddenly are not – out.
Gitta Sereny, 91, Who Wrote (Often) About Evil, And Evildoers
“Ms. Sereny’s books were as much psychological studies as historical ones. As her work made plain, she was interested less in plumbing the ‘what’ of history’s evil deeds than she was in the ‘why’ of their perpetrators. Few people if any, she often said, were born evil; instead, she argued, they were made that way by traumatic conditions that could generally be located in childhood. What interested her above all was conscience.”
Everything We Owe To Alan Turing, On His 100th Birthday
“All of modern computing is underpinned by this notion. Every piece of software you use is running on layers of simulated computers that are as powerful as the physical hardware they’re running on — and as powerful as each other. A program running on a simulated Turing Machine works exactly the same way as one running on a non-simulated one; simulation has no effect on the complexity of the programs that can be run.”
Dance Explodes Onto The (Tablet-Sized) Screen
“‘Fifth Wall,’ the title of the work and a new application available only for iPads, is the latest offering from the 2wice Arts Foundation, which published a revered biennial magazine of the same name. Its last print issue appeared in 2009. Now 2wice has gone digital, but not in the usual way that magazine applications transfer copy from one format to the other. Essentially the iPad app — in the form of an interactive performance — is the new issue of the magazine.”
To Steal A DalÃ, All Thief Needed Was A Black Bag
“The man who stole a drawing by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalà on Tuesday wore only the most basic of disguises: that of an everyday gallery visitor, walking past the Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst works on display. And he brought only the most basic of tools for his heist: a black shopping bag.”