Edwin Yoder: “Despite the warnings of C. S. Lewis and others, I am left echoing Eve’s question: if the beasts [can eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil], why not man? Why, having armed his new creatures with intellectual curiosity, should their thirst for intellectual adventure become the paramount sin and its exercise a cosmic catastrophe? This prohibition seems especially odd because it contradicts what we know of Milton the lifelong scholar and polymath.”
Tag: 07.31.18
Where Art And Activism Meet, And Why They Can’t Merge
“In their mandate to be awake to life, and to awaken others, the sympathies of artists and activists seemingly align. But in the activist context, awake becomes ‘woke’ — not a personal practice of observation and a transmutation within form, but a communal decision in service of a desired change. This ‘in service of’ is the sticking point for artists.” (At the end of that road lies Socialist Realism.) Arielle Angel looks back at her many attempts to unite art and activism on equal terms — and her questions about whether, in the current moment, the former is a luxury she should give up in favor of the latter.
New Power Versus Old Power In The Arts
“It would be difficult to think of a field that is more old-power than the arts. As the former executive director of a nonprofit theater company, I know that firsthand. Many arts organizations–particularly in the performing arts–are usually headed by an artistic director, music director, or general manager who has almost total control over the artistic content that is produced, and that artistic content is then marketed to the public by the managerial staff who has little or no say on these artistic selections. Closely connected with this old-power/new-power dynamic is the way that technology has been embraced in these organizations (or not).”
Has This Scholar Figured Out How To Perform Ancient Greek Music?
Despite the wealth of information we have about ancient Greek musical theory, actually transcribing the musical notation that has survived, let alone working out practical performance issues, has been a problem unsolved for centuries. Oxford classicist Armand D’Angour writes about the recent advances and discoveries that have led to his five-years-long-and-counting project to find, transcribe, and perform the surviving repertoire of ancient Hellenic song.
William Hobbs, 79, Pathbreaking Fight Choreographer
His great innovation was to move beyond elegant, swashbuckling swordplay to show real bodies showing the sweat and blood of combat and real, fallible people making missteps.
The Reasoning Behind The Cranach-Norton Simon Court Decision? Respecting National Sovereignty
The crux of the case, brought by the heir of the art dealer who owned the Adam and Eve paintings before World War II, was whether the Dutch government had the right to sell the works on when it recovered them post-1945. The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decided, basically, that it would not second-guess the Kingdom of the Netherlands.
A New Wave Of Dance Films Made On, And For, Smartphones
“It’s a testament to the sophistication of mobile devices that the strengths and weaknesses of the films have little to do with technical issues. Several of the movies look amateurish or are just plain bad, but none because of image quality or outdated effects. The flaws are artistic.” Brian Seibert reports from the first Mobile Dance Film Festival.
BookTubers: The YouTube Figures Who Get Thousands Of Followers For Videos About Books
Christine Riccio, the most popular of the bunch: “I was reading a lot of books, and I had no one to discuss them with. I was like, ‘I’ll be lucky if I ever get 500 subscribers over here.'” She now has more than 400,000. Reporter Concepción de León meets Riccio and several of her fellows at VidCon (yes, it’s sort of like ComicCon, but for videomakers).
Facebook Scammers Target Edinburgh Fringe Performers
A member of the company told The Stage she was contacted by a woman through an Edinburgh Facebook group, who said she had two rooms available at £400 each and a friend had a further three rooms. The theatre company paid the money and a deposit up front. After this, they received a message from the woman who said she was in Ukraine and her bag had been stolen, asking the theatre company to transfer her money to come back to the UK. At this point, the company realised they had been scammed, and contacted Action Fraud, which is investigating the case.
Mayr’s ‘Medea’ at Teatro Nuovo: Stars evolved and aligned for the opera and La Rowley
Giovanni Simone Mayr (1763-1845) is hardly the sexiest name in opera history, but he became exactly that between the hours of 4 and 8 p.m. on July 29 at Purchase College — make that 4:35 p.m. Mayr’s Medea in Corinto needed time to warm up.