Tag: 08.27.17

Mexico Creates New Federal Police Division To Fight Trafficking Of Art And Antiquities

“Mexico has been criticized for failing to register the theft of stolen cultural antiquities and for a lack of coordination among authorities responsible for preserving the items. Many church paintings are replicas of the two- and three-hundred year old paintings that have been stolen. According to official figures last year, 90 percent of stolen cultural objects, including archaeological pieces, liturgical objects and religious art, are never recovered.”

So Curiosity Is A Genetic Trait?

“There are many studies that have shown that there is a strong genetic component to curiosity,” he notes. “It is also the case that some people are more curious than others, in the same way that some people have talent for music and others don’t or some people are smarter than others … But all people are curious, with the possible exception of people who are very deeply depressed or have certain kinds of brain damage.” Humans exhibit two basic types of curiosity that show up in different parts of the brain during functional MRI scans.

Why Ecological Art Has Largely Failed

“Looking for years for land art that utilizes the environment as complexly as artists have long done with their subjects through paint (even using paint as a subject), I’ve come up largely disappointed. Land artworks are typically aesthetic interventions forced onto the environment by artists with little to no deep understanding (geologic, ecologic, botanic, etc.) of the materials they are using. Instead, artists who make these works favor aesthetic, surface-level intervention, which documents well for exhibition and (hopefully) sale later, upon return to an art-world setting, be it via a gallery or a coffee table book. Where is the communion with the land’s complexity?”

Is Theatre An Ideal Space To Get An ‘Empathy Workout’?

Yes. Theatre is, to put it bluntly, special (and science backs that up). “There is something about theatre in particular that transforms the way we consider humanity. After surviving millennia, it remains one of the most popular and desirable modes of storytelling. Beyond entertainment, there is something we gain at the neural level by engaging with theatre.”

The Oregon Bach Festival Suddenly Fires Its Popular Artistic Director After A Season Lackluster In Earnings

Matthew Halls, halfway through a four-year contract that saw him take the Oregon Bach Festival in the direction of historically informed performance, says he doesn’t know why he was fired, and the University of Oregon’s press release is not useful (“We look forward to a wider range of programmatic choices, community events, and cross-departmental relationships with UO faculty, staff, and students,” for instance). “Halls said he was not well versed in the specifics of his contract, which was to have expired in 2020. ‘I can’t begin to communicate the personal sadness I’m feeling,’ he said.”