07.08.14 – Page 2 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Arts Workers’ Protests Sabotage Opening Night Of France’s Aix Festival

“A group of performers, myself included, left our portakabins to make for the stage within the main building, but shockingly the entire area had suddenly been occupied by about 40 protesters who were blowing klaxons, chanting and yelling, banging metal pans with metal spoons and jostling with police and the theatre’s large security men.”

Director Steven Soderbergh On Why He Quit Movies

It stopped being fun. It just stopped being fun. It really wasn’t. That’s a big deal to me. It may sound like “Why do you have to have fun to go to work?” I don’t know. I like to be in a good mood. The ratio of bullshit to the fun part of doing the work was really starting to get out of whack.

All The Stuff We’re Learning As The Met Opera And Its Unions Negotiate In Public

“Now, as the company tries to win concessions from its unions by the end of this month, the labor talks are laying bare new details of life at the Met, from what performers earn to the Met’s recent box office struggles – which, an analysis of ticket sales showed, led the company to sell as many as a quarter of its seats at a discount at a handful of performances.”

Director Christopher Nolan (‘The Dark Knight’) On The Bleak, Bright Future Of Cinema

“A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster. … This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals – the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.”

Stolen Matisse Returned To Venezuela After 14 Years

“The Odalisque in Red Pants (Odalisque à la culotte rouge) is thought to have been stolen from the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002 but its disappearance went unnoticed for some time because the thieves put a fake in its place.”

Could Budget Cuts Shut Down Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art?

City funding for the museum, known as MACRO, was slashed from €350,000 in 2013 to €61,000 this year. Says the museum’s director, whose contract ran out at the end of June, “We literally have €5,000 a month” from the municipal government.

What The Arab-Israeli Conflict Looks Like To Martians (As Channeled By Margaret Atwood)

“The Martians make a visit to Earth. When they get there, everyone on the planet is in a huge meeting. ‘What are they doing’ say the Martians. ‘They’re discussing Peace in the Middle East,’ says one of the Three Wise Persons. … ‘How can it be,’ say the Martians to the Three Wise Persons, ‘that nobody can figure out how to accomplish a thing that everyone seems to want?'”

Comic Books Are Taking On The Debt Ceiling, Environmental Disaster, And The Global Financial Crisis

The DC title Injustice depicts a Superman who has become a global dictator. (He sends the Green Lantern to Congress to break the debt ceiling deadlock.) And the Godzilla spin-off Monstrous looks at what happens after one giant radioactive monster defeats and kills another: the corpse is now toxic waste.

The CIA Has A Style Manual (And It’s Ruthless)

The darnedest things turn up from Freedom of Information Act requests: the Directorate of Intelligence’s Style Manual & Writers Guide for Intelligence Publications (eighth edition, 2011). “As revealed in the manual, the CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of ‘crisp and pungent’ language ‘devoid of jargon’.”

Tag: 07.08.14