Philadelphia Art Alliance Absorbed By University Of The Arts

“The acquisition gives the university a gracious formal parlor a few blocks from its Broad Street campus in a neighborhood populated by many of the city’s most generous arts donors. … The change marks a bittersweet epoch for the Art Alliance, which had once brought to the city the likes of Man Ray, Martha Graham, and Andrew Wyeth, but which lost a good deal of its cutting-edge sheen in recent decades. Its six small galleries now mostly exhibit contemporary crafts and design.”

Get A First Look Inside A Newly-Opened 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Tomb

“Discovered at the Dra Abul Naga necropolis on the west bank of the Nile [near Luxor], the newly opened tomb holds statuettes, mummies, pottery, and other artifacts … One of the statues depicts a goldsmith named Amenemhat sitting beside his wife. A figure of one of their sons stands beneath them. The archaeologists say the family lived during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.” (includes video)

Ian Buruma Talks About Launching A New Era At The New York Review Of Books

“Some shoes are harder to fill than others. Robert Silvers .. ran the left-leaning intellectual magazine with single-minded fervor from the time he co-founded it in 1963 until he died at 87 in March. His shoes may as well be Shaquille O’Neal’s.” But Buruma is up for the challenge, and, as he tells John Williams, he’ll do his job differently: “It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation. Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative.”

Meet Ira Lightman, Poetry Plagiarism Detective

Lightman is feared, reviled and lauded in the poetry world. For some, he’s a tireless vigilante, bravely aiming his chin at his enemies. For those enemies, he’s a bully and a witch-finder with an unnatural obsession. For others still, he’s in error; some of his targets aren’t plagiarists at all, they argue, just sloppy note-keepers. Moreover, Lightman makes no allowances for the practice of “intertextuality”: when you take someone else’s poem and use its structure, mood or language as a foundation for something new.

It’s Unanimous: “The Shape Of Water” Wins Venice Film Festival

The world’s oldest film festival has crowned some contentious and controversial winners over the years, but this time, the press and the jury are in agreement: “The Shape of Water” was rapturously acclaimed by critics when it unspooled on the festival’s second day, and has been has been firmly installed as a Golden Lion frontrunner ever since.

A Dance Company For Dancers In Wheelchairs

“People with disabilities lived with the stigma that they can’t do this, they can’t do that, they can’t dance, they can’t walk, they can’t talk. When you dance with a partner, you really forget who you’re dancing with. You forget their age, you forget their ability, disability, ethnicity, height, weight, you know, forget all of that. You start to see people and feel people as people, not a person in a wheelchair.”

Greg Escalante, 61, King Of The Lowbrow

Escalante is one of the key figures associated with Lowbrow, a pop-inflected school of art that emerged in 1970s California, and which drew inspiration from underground comics, punk music, tattooing, the custom car scene, and surf and skate culture — the exact opposite of what the minimalist-minded mainstream art world was into during that era.

Oregon Bach Festival Music Director Fired Over Joke?

“Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley. It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur.”