“The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has accused British authorities of turning their backs on human rights defenders after UK immigration officials rejected his application for a six-month business visa, claiming he had not declared a criminal conviction in his home country.”
Tag: 07.30.15
Inside The Floating 3-D Head Of Marlon Brando
“One unusual sequence in the documentary Listen to Me Marlon shows a seemingly low-tech digital version of the actor Marlon Brando quoting Macbeth. His head floats in black space and the image looks three-dimensional yet still raw. These visuals were constructed by the filmmakers from a series of scans of Brando’s head that were made around 20 years ago.” (includes video)
New Musical Loses Half Its Cast Amid Delays And Dissension
Five actors and four dancers will be leaving the 19-person cast of Dusty, a new show about the singer Dusty Springfield, by the end of August. The producers of the show, which began performances in an Off-West End theatre in late May, keep postponing the press night.
Motels, Marrakech, And Mouths: From The Travel Journals Of Lawrence Ferlinghetti
“I find a variety store-bar called the Sans-Souci. Inside is a drunk loudmouth of about 50 and a platinum blonde who looks like she’s been thru all the mills and talks tough. The drunk is saying: Well, if you waz ever in a war, you’d see something. She says: I ain’t gettin near no war! I’m not thinkin of wars, I’m thinkin of prisons!”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.30.15
Peter Brant’s Brands: Whither ARTnews and Art in America?
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-07-30
The Whole-Tone Hypothesis
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-07-30
So you want to see a show?
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-07-30
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Behind The Merger Of ArtNews and Art In America
“Whatever happens with the merged magazines, it looks bad. You can read it as another chapter in the sad decline of print. But scrutinizing the tea leaves, you can also see it as another augury that the discourse of art is more and more subordinate to fashion-obsessed celebrity and short-term finance.”
Violette Verdy On What Makes A Great Dancer
A musical dancer helps you to see and feel the music in your own body; a dancer with a superior musicality goes even further, playing against the music, entering into a conversation with it, bending it to her own wishes. This is the kind of dancer Verdy was. Such musicality is innate.
‘I Would Have Jumped Off A Roof For Mao’: Li Cunxin, ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’, From The Cultural Revolution To The 21st-Century West
“Forced into ballet as a child in Mao’s China, Li Cunxin defected to the US and had to work as a stockbroker to support his family back home. But he never quit dancing. As he brings the Queensland Ballet to Britain, he talks about his traumas and triumphs – and shock at seeing people take their privileged lives for granted.”
When Genius Becomes Banal – How We See Greatness
“We have a problem of seeing, just as we often have a problem hearing (or hearing clearly), say, a Beethoven symphony. It’s hard to get back to our first enraptured seeings and hearings, when Van Gogh and Beethoven struck our eyes and ears as nothing had before; and yet equally hard to break through to new seeings, new hearings. So we tend, a little lazily, to acknowledge greatness by default, and move elsewhere, away from the crowds discovering him as we first discovered him.”