We’ll adapt, argues Claude L. Fischer – just as we’ve been worrying about and adapting to new developments in information technology for two or three dozen centuries.
Tag: 08.04.14
Royal Ballet Of Flanders Fires Artistic Director
“Although the ballet did not provide an explanation for letting her go, from the beginning, [Assis] Carreiro was a controversial choice for the role of artistic director. … Dancers wrote a letter to the organisation’s board late last year citing that 69% of them had voted no confidence in the artistic director. Eventually, one-third of the company left.”
Is A Decrease In Testosterone Responsible For The Development Of Human Art?
“Human civilization, and the artistic activities associated with it, came about as a result of a measurable decline in testosterone levels that began accelerating around 80,000 years ago, according to a study published in the August issue of Current Anthropology.”
The Spy Heroes Fighting To Save Syria’s Ancient Treasures
Hoping to help in catching smugglers and eventually rebuilding whatever possible, Cheikhmous Ali and his fellows are risking their lives, using equipment such as cameras hidden inside ballpoint pens (yes, really) to document the catastrophic damage to historic buildings and artifacts from Syria’s civil war. (in English)
Jed Perl: Art For Art’s Sake Is Losing As Liberals Need It To Do More
“In our data- and metrics-obsessed era the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is losing ground. Instead of art-as-art we have art as a comrade-in-arms to some more supposedly stable or substantial or readily comprehensible aspect of our world. Now art is always hyphenated. We have art-and-society, art-and-money, art-and-education, art-and-tourism, art-and-politics, art-and-fun. Art itself, with its ardor, its emotionalism, and its unabashed assertion of the imagination, has become an outlier, its tendency to celebrate a purposeful purposelessness found to be intimidating, if not downright frightening.”
Double Hand Transplant Patient Returns To Drawing And Playing Piano
“Richard Mangino, a quadruple amputee, became the world’s first successful double hand transplant case at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. … Now Mangino, a musician and painter who lost his lower arms and legs to an infection in 2002, has gained enough sensation in his fingers to draw as well as play music.” (includes video)
Steve Post, 70, NYC’s Gloriously Grumpy Classical Radio Host
Possibly the most brilliant, and surely the funniest, on-air fundraiser public radio has ever had, Post was (in the words of a WNYC executive) “a world-class curmudgeon whose irreverence and iconoclasm have entertained audiences and appalled radio station managers for four decades.”
So There’s A Neurological Explanation For Why Boomers Think Their Culture Was Best
“The music that moved us in our youth stays with us for a lifetime. It imprints itself on our brains when our personalities are still forming. It mingles with our memory functions and defines our sense of pleasure. It restores a sense of wholeness to even the most fractured souls. But its effect may also account for something else – the fact that people tend to love throughout their lives the music (and movies and books and television) they loved as kids and teenagers. That’s another way of saying there might be a neurological reason baby boomers can be so boring when they insist their music was so much better than anything that came before or after. They can’t help it.”
Five Things TV Could Teach The Music Industry About Reinventing In The Digital Age
“Not only has TV switched successfully from “giving it away” to a subscription model, but the shift has also spurred a new golden age of television. The same economic pressures that are killing the music business have led to the highest quality shows in the history of the medium.”
Can Dance Be A Bridge During Conflict? These Israeli And Palestinian Artists Are Trying
“Can’t dance be a tool that helps scrape away old, stale hate and bring physical, spiritual understanding? Can’t people feel, under their dancing feet, a common ground? I did a little research and found that, yes, in some ways this has been happening.”